The Writing and Randomness of a Physical Therapist and Sci-Fi/Fantasy Author

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100 Words A Day

The one thing I’ve struggled with over the last three years (and really since I started writing) is finding a routine. Granted the last 6-7 years (and especially the last 3) have been difficult when trying to combine writing with school. My writing life has pretty been much nonexistent for the last 3 years since I started PT school. I occasionally feel guilty about this, but then I remember that PT needs and deserves a tremendous amount of time since it’s me studying for my career. Writing is still at the hobby stage.

Anyway, this lack of schedule has resulted in me not finished a project in probably three years. But it’s also seen me start like 3-4 other projects I had no business starting because I now have a tremendous pile of work to catch up on and finish before I can move on to some other ideas.

Now that things have sort of settled down during clinicals, I’ve been writing more but still not as much as I wanted to. So beginning of February I decided to challenge myself to write at least 100 words/day. Partly to find this elusive thing people call a routine, and also to finish up a project.

The result?

Even after missing 5 days in February since starting the challenge, I still managed 9,567 words for the month. I can say with a high degree of certainty that’s a higher monthly word count than I’ve managed in awhile. So seeing that I can write almost 10K in the shortest month of the year (and that’s even with missing about a week of writing days in there), I decided to keep it up but now challenging myself to writing 10K in March. I’m already ~2200 in.

This little exercise has proved to me, the queen of I don’t have time, that yes, I do have time to write. Even if some nights it doesn’t happen until 11 pm. (whoops). It’s been a great exercise for me. Some days I barely get the 100. Other days I’m pushing almost 1000, and days with everything in between. It’s helped me push through some minor blocks where I have to get some words down in order to meet the daily goal. I’m writing this project in a notebook so it’s highly satisfying to sit down for a writing session thinking I’ll barely make it, only to churn out 3-4 pages.

I like the word count better than a time limit. It’s not many words to get and you’re not watching the clock (which I find more distracting). One of these days I might bump the daily goal up to 200/day but let’s not get crazy. 😛 I also think it’s making me a faster writer??

In short, I’m loving this challenge. It’s making me plan ahead to writing sessions. I’ve had several days where I’m like “let me get my 100 words in and then we can go do something”. It really doesn’t take very long and then you’re 100 words further into the story. I’ve made some tremendous progress on this story I’m working on, and I’m very confident that I’ll be finishing it by the end of March. Maybe even in the next week or so. And then on to work on the next project that’s been waiting for me to finish it for 3 years…

What’s your writing routine look like? Do you have a word count or time limit or are you a spontaneous writing dragon?

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24 thoughts on “100 Words A Day”

Hi Claire,
I have been blogging for three years and I work outside the home as a teacher with papers to grade.
I blog about blogging tips, so I know many bloggers express concern over the lack of time to write and live the rest of their lives like you have in this post.
I have published three articles suggesting blogging schedules that truly allow you to have time to “do it all”. I also blog about time-saving tools for bloggers.
I hope you will consider checking out my blog so you can have access to these articles.
Janice

Good job on finding a routine that works for you. I don’t have a routine really, I simply write whenever I get the chance. I worked out a little while ago that waiting for the perfect conditions to write simply means I don’t write, so often it’s while sitting on the toilet seat as the kids have a bath, or on the bus, or waiting at the school gates.

For me it’s not about word count, since I write a lot of flash fiction and some of them are only 100 words, but I might spend a long time ensuring I’ve got exactly the right word. For the longer projects, I guess it’s about time, and making sure my bum is on seat for a certain amount of time, no matter how hard I’m finding it 🙂

If only the perfect conditions would come along more frequently. 😉 Yeah, the great thing about this goal for me is that I have to sit down and write no matter how hard I’m finding it. Before I’d just put it off if I “wasn’t feeling it”. I think that’s one of the best things to come out of this experiment. 🙂

Flash fiction is something I’d like to get back into doing. I’ve only done a little of it, but it’s enjoyable.

Thanks for stopping by and commenting, Ben! Best of luck with your writing!

Nice! I’ve been using Scrivener, so I plug in my total count I want to get to, and the date I want to have it by, tell it what days I write on (usually leaving off Sat/Sun and Weds as those are days when I have so much other stuff going on that I can’t count on having any time to write) and it tells me how many words per day I need to write on “writing days” in order to hit my goal. It’s very nice. Sometimes I do need to extend my schedule if we get sick or go on vacation or something else interrupts the normal routine… but it definitely keeps me on task having a goal to reach each day.

I think I need to do a blog post on Scrivener soon. People keep asking me about it. The short answer is, I love it. It is a fantastic drafting tool, and makes creating e-books extremely easy. It has a lot of tools I like, though I probably only use about 10% of them. Overall, the learning curve isn’t too bad, it comes with a really fantastic tutorial that is a bit tedious, but definitely worth going through.

First off, congratulations on establishing your 100-words-a-day routine! Getting into the habit takes time and deliberate effort, which you are clearly putting forth.

My writing routine looks like this: Alarm at 7:00 AM, breakfast by 7:30, first alarm on my phone, titled “Time to Write!” sounds at 8:00 AM. I then work on my current work for two hours. My second alarm, “Time to Edit!”, goes off at 10:00 AM. I edit one of my older manuscripts for two more hours before finally taking a break at 12:00 for lunch and a walk outside. My goal, like yours, revolves around word count: 2,000 a day, but I almost always go over by at least 100 words.

I think one thing that attracts me to NaNo is that, even if I don’t win, it makes me push harder to get the words in. Not something I’d want to do every month, but it works once a year. 🙂 We all have our own methods though.

I used to be a spontaneous writing dragon, but that routine failed me and made me so slow. 😛 Now when i have a project, I try to get at least two pages written a day. Right now I’m so busy with editing though that I can’t find time to do any writing, which is a problem! Maybe making a small goal like 100 words would help me out.